1. I submitted the blog to Amazon for publication on the Kindle. Their form says they have a backlog, so we’ll see if it ever happens. If you have any pull at Amazon, put in a word for us.

2. We now have a Facebook page called The Baseline Scenario. If that link doesn’t work for you you should be able to search for it and then become a fan. The page imports the RSS feed from the blog, so you can read the blog without leaving Facebook, if that’s your cup of tea. There is also a Wall that you can post things to as usual. In the future, we may figure out more things to do on Facebook, but that’s it for now.*

We do these things (Twitter, too) because we want to make things easier for our readers. It’s a generally correct rule in business that it is a good thing to make life easier for your customers. I believe that if you want people to read your stuff, you have to go where they are – and if that’s Twitter, or Facebook, or Kindle, then that’s where you should be.

* Incidentally, I don’t understand the Facebook model. They seem to be trying to get people to use and enjoy the Internet within the tight confines of Facebook. This reminds me of the old days of CompuServe and AOL. Ordinarily when I work I have about 10-12 tabs open on my browser, and at most one of them is Facebook. There is so much stuff on the Internet, why would you limit yourself to the stuff your friends posted? Besides, I find their user interface non-intuitive, and with each iteration they make it less powerful – and I used to work at a software company.

Comments are an important part of this blog, and I’m sure that many of you read the blog as much for the comments as for the posts. I’m also very proud of the knowledge, intelligence, and writing ability of our commenters. Simon and I write about a wide range of topics, and so it is never a surprise to me to find comments from people who know any particular topic far better than I do. Looking at other economics blogs, I think we have one of the best discussion communities around, with both a large number and a high average quality of comments.

However, there has been a recent increase in the number of comments that can be construed as offensive in one way or another. While most hardened Internet commenters can probably take a personal  attack now and then, I’m afraid this will intimidate some people and deter them from joining the discussion. So we are creating some guidelines for comments, which are really nothing more than what you should have learned in kindergarten.

1. No profanity.

2. No attacks or insults aimed at other commenters. Calling a public official an idiot is one thing; calling someone who just wrote a comment an idiot is another.

3. No attacks or insults aimed at entire categories of people based on race, gender, religion, national origin or identity, or something similar.

If I see comments falling into these categories, I will delete them. I am also adding filters on a few words to flag comments for moderation. I expect most of those comments will be approved. For example, if you use the word “moronic,” I just want to check that you are referring to, say, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, not a previous comment.

Thank you for all of your comments. For those of you who do not comment, thank you for reading the blog. It’s no exaggeration to say that Simon and I would not be doing this if it were not for all of you.

By James Kwak

If your comments are not showing up: We use WordPress.com, and its optional spam filter, Akismet. I have no control over what Akismet flags as spam. Ordinarily it is very good, but I just looked in the spam folder and noticed that an unusually high number of legitimate comments got accidentally flagged as spam. I freed those I found from spam-land (which should help those of you who are serial commenters), but this problem may recur. I don’t have time to check the spam filter very often, but I will try to glance at it now and then.

We also filter for certain abusive or profane words and for people with a history of writing abusive comments (personal attacks on other people).

By James Kwak

At the request of several readers, I’ve printed entire months of blog posts to PDFs for download. There is also a “Download the Blog (PDF)” link in the sidebar under navigation. This might be useful for new readers who want to catch up on a plane, or something like that.

I did this in a very low-tech way (explained after that link) so if you have suggestions for how to do it faster or more elegantly please post them there.

By James Kwak

Twitter

We are going to start experimenting with Twitter. I’m not sure how we’re going to use it, but our handle is baselinescene and you can find it here. Simon and I are sharing one account and, if we remember, will put our initials at the end of updates so you can tell who is who. We will probably use it to announce new posts (but probably not all of them, since right now I don’t know how to do it automatically), link to articles we find interesting but don’t have time to blog about, and broadcast random thoughts about the economy. (Don’t expect to find what we ate for lunch – unless it’s really good.) If this doesn’t turn into something useful, we’ll stop using it.

I’m not going to explain what Twitter is and how to use it, because I don’t really know. If you don’t know and you’re curious, ask someone under the age of 30.

Update: Thanks to the reader who pointed out twitterfeed, our new blog posts are now automatically added to our Twitter updates.

Also, for those who may be worried: If you ignore Twitter, you won’t be losing out on anything important; there’s nothing we do on the blog today that we are moving to Twitter.

Email updates

Several people have pointed out that our automated email updates do not include the name of the author for each post. This is a problem with Feedburner (the service we use to generate and send these updates) and there is no known solution.* So we have decided to start manually adding our names at the end of posts from now on. Since this is manual, we may forget from time to time; you can always find out who the author is by visiting the post itself on the web.

* We can’t use FeedFlares because we use WordPress.com, which doesn’t allow Javascript.

By James Kwak